Abstract
We examine whether particular types of stress are related to particular types of crime or whether all types of stress are related to all types of crime. Our estimates are based on analyses of within-individual change over a 36 month period among recently incarcerated offenders. We find that assault is most strongly related to family stress, suggesting that conflicts between family members lead to assault. Economic crimes (property crimes and selling illicit drugs) are most clearly related to financial stress, suggesting that these crimes often reflect attempts to resolve financial problems. On the other hand, crime is generally unrelated to stress from illness/injury, death, and work. The results support the idea that criminal behavior is a focused response to specific types of problems rather than a general response to stress. They are more consistent with explanations that focus on perceived rewards and costs (e.g., the rational-choice approach) than with explanations that portray negative affect as a generalized impetus toward violence or crime (e.g., frustration aggression approaches).
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Notes
Another possibility is that these variables mediate between stress and crime, such as if the death of a family member led a respondent to use hard drugs, which in turn motivated financial crimes. In that case, it would be preferable to omit these variables from the analysis. To test for this possibility, we also estimated all models without controlling for these measures. The pattern of results remained the same, though the statistically significant relationships were somewhat stronger.
Preliminary analysis indicated that this coding efficiently capture the relationship of these several drug items to offending.
Note that our analyses address only the relatively immediate effects of stress and not any more enduring effects that could conceivably arise from chronic stress. We examined that possibility as well, but the results were not informative. If frequently enduring stress engenders offending over an extended period, then individuals’ mean levels of stress over time would be associated with their mean offending, above and beyond the monthly relationship. This relationship is captured by the between-individual terms in our analyses. None of these effects reached statistical significance, but their standard errors were so large that these significance tests mean very little.
These coefficients come from models including all the variables shown in Table 2.
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Felson, R.B., Osgood, D.W., Horney, J. et al. Having a Bad Month: General Versus Specific Effects of Stress on Crime. J Quant Criminol 28, 347–363 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-011-9138-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-011-9138-6